Word: lamenting
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...dance to a slick song, picking up its title from Billie Holiday's croon, "If I should take a notion to jump into the ocean, ain't nobody's business if I do." Kramer uses her own slinky way of moving to draw the sinuous lines of Holiday's lament. At one point she cooly trails her index finger along the floor, then follows its path with the rest of her lankiness...
...still admires people who sacrifice money and security for independence and freedom, but he takes a more charitable view of those who don't, as in one of the album's best cuts, a ballad called "Night Riders' Lament". One gets the impression that his friend Mike Burton wrote it as a sort of tribute to anyone who's ever done what he wanted instead of what he was expected to do. The narrator is a cowboy who fled the city for a simpler, older way of life, to the bafflement of his friends. One of them writes...
Hogan's Goat by William Alfred. This ten-year-old play is part ethnic memory, part ethnic lament. It evokes Irish customs and political power in the Brooklyn of 1890. In a fiery monologue, Matt Stanton (Steven Ryan), a ward boss, describes his immigrant passage across the Atlantic in midwinter. The men and women in the fetid, icy hold were like unhousebroken animals...
...writes, "I have been deformed. Granted, my judges sentenced me to only twenty years' imprisonment to make it plain that I did not deserve a life sentence. But in reality they have physically and mentally destroyed me. Ah, these spokesmen of humanitarianism! Only twenty years!" Is this the predictable lament of every prisoner, or is it the bitter, uncomprehending outrage of a man who simply does not understand his own criminality...
...cast is unexceptional, so is most of LaZebnik's score. LaZebnik is a better lyricist than composer, but even some of his lyrics--like the blackly humorous "Happy When" a nostalgic ode to murderous wives--are not particularly inspired. Among the show's best numbers are Lear's quizzical lament, "Where is Cordelia?" expertly delivered by Stephen Morris, and the finale, "So What If Hope is Gone," which suggests a way of coping with unhappy endings...